Walt Stanchfield Books available for Pre-Order!

Amazon finally has the Walt Stanchfield books available for pre-order! Even if you have a copy of the notes provided by Animation Meat, these books are still going to be a worthwhile part of your animation education.

The right thing to do

The good news is that Dee Stanchfield, Walt Stanchfield's wife, is publishing a book of all Walt's notes. It is currently being compiled and hopefully will be available soon. The not so good news is that we will be taking down the Walt Stanchfield notes from the site by the end of the week.

This site has always been about keeping the information alive. The only reason we started posting animation notes and tips and such was to make sure the information was never lost. Before, there was no way to obtain this information. Now there will be. Because all of the information from Walt's notes will now be in the book, it is not necessary to keep them on the site anymore. We wish Dee Stanchfield the best with the book and will include a link for ordering it when it becomes available.

Notes for the New Year!

Chapters 62 - 65 of the Walt Stanchfield notes now available for download. Also, we have Entertainment 11 - 14 from Eric Larson now available for download. A big thanks goes out to Tom Dow for all of his hard work. He transcribed the notes himself and sent them in to us. Thanks Tom! Enjoy the T-Shirt!

Eric Goldberg Notes

Yes, we have a whole set of notes by Eric Goldberg. No, we will not be putting them up anytime soon. Long ago, when they were completed we put them up...for a about a day. Hoops had been contacted by Eric and he asked that we take them down because he was in the middle of writing a book. Of course we wanted to respect his wishes. That was about 5 years ago. We are still awaiting Eric's book and fully intend to help promote it when it comes out. In fact, recently Hoops talked to him and found out he had changed his plans and is writing TWO books! Awesome news!

So if you are looking for the Eric Goldberg Notes, all we can say is be on the look out for his book sometime in the future. They'll all be in there and much, much more!

New field guides

We really needed a standard traditional 12F guide for TV. Now we have one. I added a new set of field guides to our templates area. Created with Stone Design's Create for Mac OS X. All are in TIFF format. There's one for large printers or a two part version for regular US Letter sized printers. You'll have to tape them up yourself. Feel free to download whatever you need.

Additional Template

For those of you wishing to contribute animation notes, we have added an IndesignCS template created to help get you started. Thanks to Damon Yoches for his help. Just visit the Templates section and download it. We also have templates for Freehand and Create. We will hopefully have Quark and Pages versions soon.

A bunch more notes...

After our big site redesign we have finally had time to look over some of the material that has been piling up in our to-do box. About 6 months ago we received a giant 400 page PDF of even more Walt Stanchfield drawing notes from the mysterious cmars. We have just started sorting all the pages and prepping them to OCR the text and clean-up the graphics. It'll take awhile but we will eventually be getting all these great notes to you in searchable e-text form. We have been playing around with Spotlight (the new search feature) on Mac OS X Tiger and it is cool that we can search on terms in all of our PDF notes. With this in mind we have been looking at ways of embedding searchable data in the model sheets so keep tuned...

In the meantime we've uploaded a few more of the first batch of Walt Stanchfield notes, enjoy!

New Notes!

One of the main reasons we started the site was to preserve all of the knowledge held in the animation notes we had collected over the years. There's tons of good stuff in there that applies to all forms of animation. It would be a shame if all this knowledge was lost. Rather than have it all sit around collecting dust in a box, we thought what better way to preserve it, than on the net! The majority of this work was done as unpublished documents to help beginning animators understand what it was they were trying to accomplish.

We now have the next 20 handouts from Walt Stanchfield ready to download. Sorry it took so long.